lie
detection

From a
press agency report:
 We stress that no spy has been caught yet using
a polygraph, said Kathryn Laskey, an associate professor of systems
engineering and operations research at George Mason University in Virginia.
[Reuters, 08.10.02]

Thelie detection report is full of words and
music, but amounts to what is widely known among sophisticates: lie
detection is a nonsense.

There is a story of some small town miscreant arrested by police as a
suspect. The sheriff took out a colander and placed it on the suspects
head. He then led a couple of wires to a copier machine on which had been
placed, unknown to the suspect, a sheet of paper with the words, he
is lying, in large bold print.
Each time the suspect denied the crime, the sheriff
would press the copy button, causing the machine to eject another copy
of the ominous message, until eventually the suspect confessed.
Whether the suspect was actually guilty is not recorded.

False confessions are surprisingly easy to wring from foolish and uneducated
people. Lie detection only works, in as much as
it does, by the fact that many foolish people believe it does.

All the machinery detects is tension, nothing else. Naturally, if you
are being questioned for a serious crime you will be tense, whether you
dun it or not. The 57 studies upon which the report relies are all laboratory
tests where those being tested are playing a game. They are not studies
related to real-world situations.

This is all the expensive 300+ page report tells you, but professionals
cant really be paid to sit on a committee and produce a report if
they just say, it is bunk; hence 300+ pages. And no-one becomes
a member of such a committee by telling the paymaster in advance that
it is all bunk.

Such is the politics of science and associated government
waste. Such are the research grants that enable people to
do the dozens of studies quoted in the report. Such are the
vested interests who provide the lie detection services
and those who manufacture the machines. The lie detection
industry profits well from the sale of their high-priced, high-margin
paraphernalia. Even the small players do well: machines (two tins and
a simple galvanometer) used by scientologists, among others, are sold
at a considerable price.

In primitive tribes, the witch doctor would dole out bunches of leaves
to be chewed, for the same purpose, relying upon the possibility that
the guilty party would have a dry mouth from fear, and thus would not
wet up the wodge.

How long does it take humans to act rationally? Lie-detectors,
and all their fancy brothers, do not detect lies. They only
detect tension. Lie-detectors can no more read minds than
you can.

Humans are exceedingly good at lying, they also easily become tense.
They are also often very ready to believe bunkum. They are also very good
at fooling themselves that they are good at things when there is no evidence
to support the assumption. Humans can even fool themselves into believing
they are good at detecting lies, especially if they have some
bits of machinery and a few dials to help them. But, in reality, you might
just as well peer into a crystal ball, or use a colander, it would be
as much use.

You can even buy a copy of this report for around $40, if you havent
found some moderately introspective pigeon to tell you the results in
advance, in far fewer and shorter words, that lie detection
is simple snake oil.

But dont tell anyone, or lie detection might not continue
to be a useful deterrent.

There is a tremendous drive in humans to believe that they understand,
or can do things, which, to put it lightly, they cannot. There is a terrible
inclination to confuse an ability to guess right some of
the time with an ability to know that which they cannot
know. In my view, the author of Telling Lies has such a problem.
However, the book does cover fairly thoroughly the subject of relationships
between dissembling, human emoting and facial expression. This is the
best book I know on this area, and the author has spent a very long time
studying the problems.

This book, like so much that is written in the social sciences,
is appalling in its disorganisation and lack of clarity of expression,
but is probably what you are stuck with in the present level of development
of academic writing on this subject.

Building
on the work of Ekman, though it is not fully acknowledged, a Cambridge
University group under Simon Baron-Cohen have produced DVD/CD-ROMs with
actors trying to express emotions. The authors have attempted
to break down human emotions into 24 sections, with 412 human
emotionscontained amongst those 24 sections! This DVD
(or 4 CD-ROMs) will be shipped to you for about £80!
The compilation may be useful for actors, or for dedicated professionals,
but it is not very well done and I cannot recommend it.

Ekman has spent much time, with colleagues, attempting to learn how to
make forty-three facial muscles work independently from one another, in
order to assess how easy or how difficult they are to control in the expression
of emotion. His work is discussed, with what I regard as naive, journalistic
hyperbole in an article, the
Naked Face.

dishonesty-detecting
textual analysis program cited in national election campaign

“According to a new computer algorithm, [Canadian] Prime Minister
Paul Martin, of the Liberal Party, spins the subject matter of his speeches
dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and
the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton.”
—
“The programme analyses the usage patterns of 88 deception-linked
words within the text of recent campaign speeches from the political
leaders. They then determined the frequency of these patterns in each
speech, and averaged that number over all of that candidate's speeches.
Martin received a ranking of 124, while Harper and Layton scored 73
and 88, respectively.
—
“Conservative parliament members, such as Jason Kenney, point
to the analysis as proof of their leader's honesty. "People used
to think he's boring, but now they recognise that he's a straight shooter
without the spin.”
—
“The computer algorithm is based on a psychological model constructed
by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas, Austin, US. While studying
the lying and truth-telling of hundreds of test subjects, he uncovered
patterns linked to deception, such as the decreased use of personal
pronouns - such as I, we, me, us - and exception words, such as "however"
and "unless". ”

“At the University of Texas at Austin, psychology professor
James Pennebaker, PhD, and his associates have developed computer software,
known as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), that analyzes written
content and can, with some accuracy, predict whether someone is lying.
Pennebaker says deception appears to carry three primary written markers:

Fewer first-person pronouns. Liars avoid statements of ownership,
distance themselves from their stories and avoid taking responsibility
for their behavior, he says.

More negative emotion words, such as hate, worthless and sad. Liars,
notes Pennebaker, are generally more anxious and sometimes feel guilty.

Fewer exclusionary words, such as except, but or nor--words that
indicate that writers distinguish what they did from what they did
not do. Liars seem to have a problem with this complexity, and it
shows in their writing.

“The LIWC software--published by Lawrence Erlbaum--has been significantly
more effective than human judges in correctly identifying deceptive
or truthful writing samples, with an average accuracy rate of 67 percent
[wrong one time in three] as opposed
to 52 percent [50% means chance!!].”

Like the book by Ekman, discussed above, this book also
is hardly written with the precision and clarity I would wish, but it gets
by and, for most people, will be worth the time and money expended.
Intuition maybe described as instinctive reaction, founded upon
your accumulated life-experiences and your genetic drives. I do not believe
that this is spelt out clearly by the author.